After all, they’ve created this way of working over the course of 15+ years. But in the end, the purity of Basecamp’s Shape Up implementation is impressive yet intimidating.

Ryan even provides explicit guidance on how to adapt the framework to different scales.

After my experience with the framework, there is no reason why Shape Up should not work for your team. It’s so very different from the Scrum/Kanban/Scrumban way of working that most tech startups are used to – sprinting 2 weeks at a time – that a very common response to it is: “Sure, that might work at Basecamp, but there is no way this could work for us, because …”. In its entirety, Shape Up can seem intimidating. If this is your first time hearing of Shape up, you best get started by reading the book (online or PDF) or by listening to some of the podcasts linked here. For the purpose of this post, I’ll assume familiarity with the framework. Since then, we’ve started to implement Shape Up – a product development framework developed at Basecamp and put into writing by Ryan Singer a few months ago. Some people on the team will still shudder if you mention “multi-space bookings”.įor context: At store2be, we’re building a platform where brands and live marketing agencies can book promotion spaces in physical locations such as shopping malls, train stations, universities, airports, public spaces and more. What we’d originally estimated to take roughly 3 sprints ended up taking around 5. I remember a particularly gnarly project where we wanted to enable our users to book multiple spaces within a given location – instead of being able to book just one space per location at a time. There was a time in late 2018 where we were having real trouble shipping the things we had planned to ship within the timeframe we’d estimated.

Shape up basecamp